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The Windows Phone 8 “Apollo” feature list

Last year, Microsoft added more than 500 features to its mobile operating system as part of the Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” update. When the company officially unveiled the update near the end of May 2011, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer proudly touted Mango’s 500 features. But with no further details available, we decided to take on the job of maintaining a list of every publicly announced feature in the update. “The Great Windows Phone Mango Feature List” quickly became one of the most popular features in the history of our site. With details about Windows Phone 8 “Apollo” beginning to surface, we decided it was time to do it again.

As with last year, we have broken down the list into four categories: new, confirmed, rumored, and debunked. New features are just that, brand new. This category includes never-before-seen features direct from Microsoft. Rumored features, on the other hand, are unconfirmed. They run the gamut from reliable to wild speculation. Confirmed features were previously rumored, but later confirmed by the software giant. Debunked features, finally, started off as rumors and were eventually proven false.

The main problem with coming up with such a list is deciding what constitutes a feature. At MIX 11, for example, Microsoft announced that the Mango update included over 1,500 new APIs. Obviously, each new API can’t be counted as a feature. If they were, Ballmer’s figure would have been at least four times larger. So what does count as a “feature?” We decided to count fairly obvious changes and improvements, rather than every single tiny detail. This means Local Scout is counted as a single feature, rather than a collection of sub-features like nearby locations, favorites, etc. We did, however, count bigger things like indoor maps. Each visual change shouldn’t count as a feature, so they are combined into groups for each hub. Finally, when it came to developer features like the aforementioned APIs, only the major ones were counted.

So, without further ado, here is the list of features included in Windows Phone 8, codenamed “Apollo.” Each feature contains a link to the most recent information on the subject. We tried to make the list as comprehensive as possible, but there’s always a possibility that we left something out. If you notice something missing, feel free to leave a comment below.

As with last year, we consider this to be a living document. We’ll be updating this list as more features are revealed, confirmed, rumored, and debunked. With Windows Phone 8 promising to be a fairly major update, it will be interesting to see how large this list will become by the time it is released. For more news on Apollo, check out the rest of our coverage.

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